Moving Nairaland To The Next Level

Dear Nairaland User, I am concerned about Nairaland.

Of recent we have been growing very strongly with 100 or more new members and almost 2000 posts daily, and on our way to recognition as a web phenomenom.  We have more traffic than perhaps every other Nigerian forum, but not as much traffic as Nigerian news and newspaper websites like NigeriaWorld and SunNewsOnline.

I am convinced that he system that has been used to manage this site to this level of growth seems to have reached its limit.  It cannot take us to the next level.  Moderation of the forum is very annoying, as we have new members and even the oldies making the same mistakes and violating the same rules over and over again.  We can't handle the current inflow of members properly, and yet we want more traffic.

I would like us to discuss how we can take Nairaland to the next level: 50,000 members, and maybe 1000 logged in users per day.  I would like us to raise various issues involved in this quest such as the forum interface and features, moderation policies, marketing, public relations, et cetera.  This is not a thread for personal attacks or the airing of grievances, but a place to give constructive and progrssive suggestions.

In particular let us first of all explore the concepts of democracy and separation of powers and see if we can apply it to this forum, because I know that if we can create a democratic forum then we would be unstoppable.  What do you think?  Dictatorship is lonely. 

Hi Seun,

It's great that you want to discuss this openly in the Nairaland community. I would encourage you to split this thread up in a few threads that discuss the different topics at hand.

- maintenance (technical & possible staff requirements)
- moderation and rules (how to create a self-organising system)
- interface improvements (technically you're very close to the optimum, but needs serious usability enhancements)
- features (do you want to create a portal? Do you need editorial content? Do you want to offer services such as webmail, etc?)

What do you think?

The first time i saw this forum, i was actually worried
because of the 4 sections and 30 subsections to discuss on.

I think the load is too much and you shouldn't try to
cover all aspects of life.

Personally, I am only interested in the Technology section
and adverts subsection and that is where you will find
most of my posts.

I once sent a PM to Seun requesting information on how he set up
the forum but he never replied me. I would have set up an
Internet Marketing Forum that will take care of interested
parties all over Nigeria and beyond.

My candid opinion is that we reduce the subsections.

Olu

I think this shouldn't be rushed or turned into a fire brigade approach. there should be a road map. just like the way google has been taking on the world.

top on my list are news, chat, and dating engine. also, nairaland needs a brand new design. this one SUCKS!

Like i said in a previous PM to you, Allow members of the site to become moderators, the site is gradually getting to a point where it needs more than one moderator.

Its also important to learn from the mistakes of other popular sites like Nigeriaworld. At the moment the user experience there is horrible. It has so many 'pop ups' and 'pop unders' its begining to look like a porn site.

This is a good idea and to achieve this you can't do it alone.This is how Tianshi Product moved from one man to multi-national business. Pick people that are in I.T thing,discuss with them.Then you will know how many departments/sections this forum requires and how many people that will be involve.

Seun

I am launching a commercial website this summer after almost one year of research in the travel industry in the unites states. The ventures are J.P north america who will spend not less than half a millon dollar to develop the website.

Having said this, I will like to give you some tips:

The traffic you are getting on this website is just enough to track your progress.
Do you have a graph that shows trancendent increase in the number of subscribers?
With that graph you can do probability calculations and see what you are getting at in the next couple of months..

Few Sugestions for u.

Try contacting TV stations in nigeria, schedule a meeting with the top managers and discuss your website with them, Try and be persuasive when you speak to help in conviction and provide figurative examples like the traffic you get from the site. Ask them if they will be intrested in a trade by barter if you dont have money for advertising with them at this time. This is a very important step concidering that most nigerians watch Television and dont have computer at their homes...also nigerians with computer at their homes are likley to have television.

The trade by bater can come in the form of featuring your site to the public and have the news company conduct "Yes or No" questionarie about a situation in nigeria (CNN and other popular website do this). In return for their surport, you can feature their websites on nairaland home page and also give them few stake from the money you make in advertising. Sit down and relax and watch propulsion in the number of traffic you get per day and dont be surprise OBJ might join

seun, can u do a competition. let all the smartarse web designers on NL provide an alternative design for this forum. the winner's design is going to be implemented. timmy, oasis and others r u there? (i hope oasis doesnt win jare...)

coz the forum's design sucks.

b4 now i was thinking something like nairaland email account, i wish if that can be available in the nairaland next level

MIKEBUDDY@nairaland.com     well that one i think it's the same thing as your PM inbox.

If am made moderator dangers will occur on this site like...

Hi Seun,

I think this is a great idea and every good webmaster should know the forum will grow to the next level but the truth of the matter is, having so many topics to handle and so many headings to read through, the capacity of the NL wont be able to meet up as time goes on. What I will suggest is:

- maintenance (removiing unnecceasary threads and syncronizing some)
- quota (space) and bandwith increase
- interface improvements (more user friendly)
- extra features like email, news, and groups

With all these, I think NL would be moving alongside sites like BBC, CNN and host of others.

My quick comments:

• Thanks a million for your suggestions.  I really appreciate your willingness to help.   
• This is a surprising request, but I can set up the server so username@nairaland.com redirects to your registered email address.  http://username.nairaland.com can also redirect to your web page.
• No, I do not think Nairaland should become a "portal".  Portals are so 1997, Google.com is in.
• Yes, this site needs multiple moderators but this can only happen if the rules are unambigous
• If the moderators are the armed forces, can we have legislators and judges too?
• Articles: Are www.naijarita.com articles publishable in Nigerian papers?

jclord: thanks for your suggestions.  I think that by browsing the forum you will agree with me that there is much more going on in Nigeria than the bad things reported by the foreign press.

Seun

I went to college with a Nigerian  friend I know the press is biased against black people and their countries in general.

Blacks in America pay a very high price for all the bad press about us.   All the Africans I have met while living
in NY are some of the hardest working people.  Not only do they work hard they strongly value education.
I have been impressed by them!

Seun,

Here are things to be prepared for:

1. Increased load on the database.
2. Increased traffic in general.
3. Increased need for moderation.
4. Increased pressure for a redesign of the phorum.

I don't know how tech savvy you are, but as this forum grows, tech-knowhow is inevitable.  Here are my suggestions:


1. Increased load on the database:

The most important thing with databases is the design.  You can run some tests on your queries using the EXPLAIN command to find out where performance needs to be improved.  If your db tables are structured and Normalised properly, it'd still be very fast, no matter how many billions of records it contains.

Make sure your keyword search queries are properly written.  I'm referring to queries such as
WHERE description LIKE '$keyword%'
or
WHERE description REGEXP $keyword

Such queries are server killers if not properly written.

Next, as your load grows, you can create replication in your database server for parallel processing.  http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/replication.html

Here's the cheapest method I know:

A. You buy several accounts on cheap but reliable hosting companies like http://www.globat.com/, http://www.powweb.com, etc for around $5 a month each.

B. You then setup the mysql servers on them as slave servers.

C. Setup your own primary database as the master.

Now all Writes will go to master server, and Reads would be load balanced between all the servers.  
The slaves will periodically get updates from the master.
As your traffic grows, you can easily add another account (database server) elsewhere (another $5 a month).

Of course, the whole thing would be easier if you just have your own facility where you can just add more machines as needed. But, that'd create a "single point of failure" problem.

2. Increased traffic in general:

As some point, your web server (let's say apache) would reach it's limit of requests it can handle.  When that happens, the forum will slow down to a crawl, or people would start to get "server busy" error.

A. To deal with this, you need to run several apache servers.  Read up on apache's Reverse Proxy.

B. If you haven't already done so, setup "catching" on your server.  That'd reduce the load on the database significantly.


3. Increased need for moderation:

It's up to you how you handle this.  I'm sure you already have plans to hire somebody.
However, you can study how responsible a member is and propose it to them.   Many won't respond, but don't give up.

4. Increased pressure for redesign:

There is one thing that a redesign means - add graphics/flash.  CSS can only go so far in giving a webpage enough pizzazz.

Adding graphics would significantly increase your traffic/bandwidth requirements.  So why would you want to do that?  Some of the most successful sites on the net are text-based: yahoo, google, craigslist, etc.

I'm happy with the design of the forum.  I come here for information exchange, not pretty graphics.  But that is one man's opinion.

Of course, you could look and see if this forum has other prettier templates that you could apply.  Or you could consider using other forum softwares that sport better interface: http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Programming/Languages/PHP/Scripts/Forums/